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$199 would be a great price if it had even 16 GB of NAND, and that way Google could help subsidize it with further Google Drive subscriptions past the one year mark. But with a mechanical drive, I wouldn't pay one dollar for this. Reply

Agreed. Mechanical hard drive and the low battery life. I wish they would shift back to the 8+ hours minimum, even if it cost a little more. The last three Chromebooks haven't reached this kind of battery life.Reply

I've read that the bigger OEMs pay about $20-$30 for a Windows license.

It's $100 more because Acer knows the market for a Windows netbook is much bigger than that for a Chromebook.

And 100GB of GoogleDrive for two years? After that you're stuck paying Google just to keep your stuff. MS doesn't give you nearly as much with Skydrive (7GB for new users, 25GB for grandfathered users) but at least it's free forever.Reply

"When you cancel your storage plan or when your storage plan expires, your storage limits will be set back to the free levels for each product at the end of your billing cycle. Everything in Google Drive, Picasa and Gmail will still be accessible, but you won't be able to create or add anything new over the free storage limit."

I'm wary about the chromebook because I don't want to get sucked into a subscription, but it's not as bad as you claim.Reply

My first thought was, "Wow, Intel must be practically giving away the chips here to try to kill the first ARM laptop." My second thought was that my first thought was a ridiculous conspiracy theory and it's just your basic cheap netbook, combined with Google's free OS and love of low hardware margins.

Any idea which it is? Plausible that Intel cut a deal to make the Acer cheaper than the Samsung? Or this is basically what you'd expect a zero-margin netbook to cost given the specs?Reply

Now Acer does not pay the same you or I do for hard drives, but only if the SSD is much more likely to lead to returns does that make any sense, and it should be the opposite (rotational drives more likely to fail).

The need for local storage is squat with Chrome OS and the user experience will be much better.Reply

The Acer has a mechanical HDD which is a lot slower than the SSD on the $250 ARM Chromebook, and this slows down a lot of operations - case in point the ARM device has a 10 sec book time compared to an 18 sec boot time for the Acer. This will considerably slow down a lot of operations as some reviews have noted.

The Acer is also clocked at 1.1 GHz instead of 1.3 GHz for the Samsung 550 Celeron Chromebook, and has 2GB of RAM instead of 4GB. This will mean the Acer is slower than the Samsung device benchmarked.

One other thing about the ARM Chromebook is that the GPU and hardware media acceleration is really good, and matches or exceeds the HD3000 Intel GPU in performance. With the ARM processor, multi-media and codec processing is handled by the hardware alone leaving the CPU unburdened. Therefore although the Exynos 5 ARM CPU might look about 2/3rds of the performance of the Intel Celeron Chromebook on paper, the Intel Celeron CPU will slow down if it has to use the CPU for codec processing at the same time as it does general processing, while the ARM CPU will not because it uses dedicated hardware. In any case, the CPU performance will only be critical for intensive flash or HTML5 processing - ie. Flash or HTML5 Javascript games. For normal rich web browsing the graphics and multi-media decoding is what governs speed, not the CPU.

Most reviewers who have run a comparison on both the ARM and Celeron Samsung Chromebooks have commented that it is difficult to tell the difference between the two except if you open 20 or more active tabs, in which case the ARM device slows down a little due to the 2GB of RAM rather than 4GB. In the case of the Acer Celeron Chromebook, this slowdown should be far more noticeable because paging from RAM to disk will be half the speed as the ARM Chromebook's SSD, and unlike Javascript execution speed where a 50% increase in speed will reduce execution time from 0.2 secs to 0.1secs saving 0.1 sec, this is something that will affect the overall speed a lot because the time saved paging to SSD rather than RAM will be seconds not milliseconds.Reply

This is not Netbook Atom CPU, but a proper Dual Core SandyBridge 1.1Ghz CPU.Intel actually has very decent Linux Graphics Drivers.

320GB Storage.

If you think of it as purely not as a Netbook, Chromebook, but a Notebook with Media And Internet function this seems like a good deal. For those who use it only with Office Work and Internet browsing.

I hope in future version they could allow 8GB RAM version, you could run everything in memory and still get most the snappiess without an SSD.Reply

Call this heresy if you want, but can these things be loaded up with Windows? It might be fun to put 7 and a whole bunch of classic games on it , kind of like a PC Gamer's GameBoy. At $200 it's cheap enough to be worth it.Reply

The prices at the budget end of the Windows laptop market seems to have crashed very recently. These machines cost a lot more a couple of months ago. This would seem to indicate that the Acer Aspire AO756 and other budget Windows laptops and netbooks aren't selling, and are being sold cheap to clear surplus stock. The fact that Acer's $199 Chromebook is a re-purposed Windows laptop with a 320 GB HDD more appropriate to Windows and a lousy battery life rather than one with 16GB SSD supports this.

I would suggest that the $199 Acer Chromebook is an interim device which will be sold until Acer can get sufficient supplies of the Exynos Soc to do a proper competing design to the Samsung ARM based Chromebook.Reply